Activities of Department of English
| Title: - "Voice of the Voiceless: A Quest for Freedom in Ghosh's The Hungry Tide and The Shadow Lines" | ||
| Start Date - 2020-10-30 End Date - 2020-10-30 Duration - 1 days. | ||
| Nature of the Activity: - Research Project | ||
| Summary: - | ||
Amitav Ghosh holds distinctive place as a novelist in Indian English literature as his novels depicts human relationship, national boundaries, and structuring his themes around families and their life - modern life with sub version of historical events. Amitav Ghosh stresses the importance of freedom of an individual. Amitav Ghosh portrays his women sensitively and infact, they are the leading spirits in his fiction. They are distinct portrayals of a cultural construction. “He never presents his women as overt radical feminists nor as the stereotypical images of Sita and Savithiri”. His women characters are unique as they do not come under the term ‘stereotypes’. They are the characters of real life and one can easily relate to them. In his novels he portrays the women characters in a realistic manner. This paper dealt with the identity of a woman – a quest for freedom - in the selected novels of Amitav Ghosh’s “The Shadow Lines” and “The Hungry Tide”. Through the portrayal of his women characters, he aims to envisage a future where women’s empowerment will lead to emancipator changes in the larger social structures. Ghosh eschews feminist attitudes to bring out the social traumas undergone by the women in his novels. Despite the fact that there are only few women characters in his novels and their role is limited, they are in control of the entire happening in the novels. They act as independent entities, growing and developing according to their own inclinations and finding social acceptance, defining their own space, determining their own lives, fighting their own battles, enjoying the fruits of victory and never fearing to taste the bitterness of defeat. The avoidance of vilification, victimization and degradation of women is commendable, though not surprising considering the fact that the author hails from the land of Kali. Ghosh in his novels have always given voice to the voiceless characters. His women characters in the novels “The Shadow Lines” and “The Hungry Tide” gives voice to insecurities, disorientation and fragmentation. The main objectives of the study are: i) To understand the women characters of Amitav Ghosh’s selected novels – their plight, suffering and their pain. ii) To compare and contrast how Ghosh’s women characters are different from the stereotypical women as portrayed in other novels written by Indian authors. iii) To celebrate the characters achievements, growth as a Human and the never dying will power – be it Tha’mma or Ila (The Shadow Lines) or Piya or Nilima (The Hungry Tide). | ||